Monday, April 28, 2025

Wordle 1409 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle's career options include crash testing.

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle after the ads below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: D

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Is Microsoft's Algorithm Unintentionally Helping Me With Wordle?

Here's my Wordle solution for yesterday:


I can actually explain how I immediately jumped from "TORSE" to "CLASH":

  1. If my starting word is wrong, I try to use a "C" in my second guess.
  2. What comes after an "S" in the next-to-last spot? "E" is a good guess, but that's already eliminated. "H" is pretty high on the likely list. I thought about "SLUSH," but try not to use the same letter twice unless it's obvious or I'm running low on guesses.
Definitely some luck there, but it just seemed like a good guess.

BUT!

It just so happened that my Microsoft-powered "new tab" page had, a few moments before I did Wordle, shown me some click bait related to a band -- The Clash.  So that word was on my mind.

I have to wonder if their algorithm didn't do something like "this user plays Wordle; this user tends to click on stories about music, definitely including 70s/80s punk; today's Wordle answer is CLASH; hey, intersection of clickability!"

It's not the first time I've noticed that the Wordle answer seems related to stuff I noticed on my "new tab" page right after I opened that "new tab" page and prepared to click on my Wordle bookmark.

Wordle 1408 Hint

Hint: Like my yard when I don't get around to mowing it in a timely manner.

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle after the ads below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: W